Liberation Square

by Gareth Rubin

  ‘Yes. I suppose I could try Charles. I’m not sure it will help, though.’

  ‘Give it a go.’

  I knew he was right. I went to the telephone. My call was answered as immediately and efficiently as I had come to expect.

  ‘The consulting rooms of Nicholas Cawson, Charles O’Shea speaking.’

  ‘Charles, it’s Jane Cawson.’

  ‘Oh, Mrs Cawson. Has Dr Cawson been released?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said.

  ‘Could you do something for me?’

  ‘I will try.’

  ‘Could you come here? There’s something I want you to look at.’

  ‘Mrs Cawson, I am at work, running the surgery.’ He sounded irritated.

  ‘I fully understand that, Charles. Please come here.’ I was firmer with him than I had been before.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘You put him in his place,’ Tibbot said, as I returned to the parlour.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. He can be very difficult.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much. He’s just very off-hand. Nick says it’s because Charles went to Harrow and resents having to take orders from a grammar-school boy, let alone from me.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s quite the comedown in his world.’

  After twenty minutes, Charles stood in the hallway, brushing down his jacket and muttering about the cost of having come by cab. Tibbot was waiting out of sight upstairs. On the way to the parlour, Charles tripped over the paraffin lamp that Nick used when the smog was heavy or when the electricity to the house cut out, refilling it from one of the nearby bottles of oil that also went into our heaters. He swore in annoyance.

  ‘Do you remember this photograph being taken?’ I asked when we had sat down.

  He glanced at it. ‘No.’

  ‘You weren’t the one holding the camera?’

  ‘No, I don’t believe so.’

  ‘What about this woman?’ I said, pointing to the driver of the car.

  ‘No idea. A friend of your husband, I presume. And his wife.’

  ‘You’re positive you don’t know?’

  He took out one of those foul Soviet cigarettes, tapped it on the packet and lighted it. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know when it was taken?’

  Charles looked at it again briefly and shrugged. ‘Pre-War?’

  ‘Pre-War? Nick doesn’t look that young. A few years younger, perhaps. And, look, there’s bomb damage to the street.’

  ‘If you know yourself, why are you asking me?’

  ‘Charles,’ I soothed my own voice. ‘Nick is in trouble. I think we can help him. But I need to know who this woman is.’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘But, Mrs Cawson, one thing I do know is that if you do anything that the Secs don’t like, such as poking around or talking to people about his arrest, it won’t go in Dr Cawson’s favour. Or in anybody else’s. If Dr Cawson has done nothing wrong, as I am sure is the case, he will soon be released and we can go back to how things were. It’s not worth the risk.’

  He was being cagey and I knew why. I had once asked Nick why Charles didn’t get another job if he disliked being a secretary so much. ‘Frankly, no one else would give him one,’ Nick had replied. ‘His parents ran off to Northern Ireland with the Royals, you see – I believe his father’s from Dublin and was supposed to be some sort of envoy to the Irish government – and they’re up in Edinburgh with the new Queen now. So no one wants to touch him for fear of being tainted by that. But he was in my regiment on D-Day and when you’ve gone through that together, well …’ He drifted off and his face took on a troubled, faraway expression that I saw from time to time when the War came up. All I could do was place my hand on his arm and hope he understood.

  ‘Charles,’ I said, ‘I appreciate what you’re saying.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he replied coldly.

  ‘I know your parents are in Edinburgh with the Queen –’

  He jumped up. ‘What does that have to do with it?’

  ‘So you don’t want NatSec knocking on your door, but –’

  ‘I am not responsible for what my parents do.’ He angrily stubbed out his fag on the grate. My eye was drawn to the livid clutch of little blisters on his hand.

  ‘Of course not. I only meant –’

  ‘Are you responsible for what your parents do?’ he demanded.

  Damn it. I had wanted to reassure him, but all I had done was to alienate him more. I was losing what little help he had been giving me. ‘I was saying that –’

  ‘Will there be anything else, Mrs Cawson?’

  I gave up. I couldn’t think of anything worth asking and he probably wouldn’t have answered anyway. ‘No.’ He glared at me for a long time before he went to the front door. Just as he was about to open it, however, he whirled around and dashed up the stairs. ‘Who are you?’ he said angrily. He was staring at Tibbot. Tibbot didn’t reply.

  ‘A friend of mine,’ I said.

  ‘A friend? Just waiting up here?’ His tone wasn’t pleasant.

  ‘It’s none of your concern.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ Tibbot replied.

  ‘Well, I’m going to ask you again.’ He stabbed his finger at Tibbot. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Look, mate, do you really fancy your luck?’ the old policeman replied. ‘Only that pricey bit of schmutter you’re wearing won’t look very nice ripped apart.’

  Charles twisted around to look down at me. ‘I don’t know what this is about, but you had better stop it.’ Realizing that he would get nowhere, he looked icily at Tibbot once more and stomped out to the street.

  ‘He’s not very happy, but that doesn’t matter,’ Tibbot said as he descended the stairs. ‘It’s a bigger problem that either he doesn’t know who this woman is or won’t tell us.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ I replied, annoyed not by Charles’s attitude – I couldn’t have cared less about what he thought of me at that moment – but by the fact that it had been a waste of precious time.

  He rubbed his jaw. ‘I can try a friend in the Transport Division. It might be Liberation Day, but if I know Kenneth he’ll be in the office enjoying the peace and quiet while everyone else is out jumping up and down for Comrade Blunt. He never really goes in for Liberation Day, if you know what I mean. Always prefers to be the one minding the shop.’

  ‘Will he help us?’

  ‘I think he’ll try. That might not be enough, though. A lot of the records went up in smoke thanks to the Luftwaffe. Of course the Party has more than made up for it with those new files in Somerset House.’ It was strange to hear a policeman talk that way. The scepticism was almost dissident. I knew what sort of files he was talking about. ‘But we might have a record of the registration plate.’

  ‘The telephone is in the hall,’ I said.

  ‘Better from somewhere else.’

  A vagrant sat sleeping inside the call box across the road from our house, slumped against the glass walls. His legs, which were bare below the knee, were covered in a damp film of soot, and he had strange bumps under the skin on his nose and cheeks. ‘Wake up, mate,’ Tibbot said. The man stirred and, without a word, hauled himself up and staggered away.

  ‘What was wrong with his skin?’ I asked.

  ‘See it quite a lot with the vagrants. Caused by a social disease they have. One of the ones that doesn’t exist.’

  He reached into his pocket and drew out a little leather-bound notebook. Inside, in tiny slanted handwriting, there were lists of telephone numbers and he ran a stubby finger down one page, then the next, until he found what he was looking for. He picked up the receiver and gave the operator the number.

  ‘Hello, Kenneth?’ he said, once connected. ‘It’s Frank Tibbot. Oh, not so bad. Not so bad. Getting old and doddery. Yeah. And tell me, what was your lot up to on Saturday? Two against Port
smouth? I could beat Portsmouth meself. Yeah, you can try. That’s right. Anyway, work call. I’ve got an old reg for you. Can you check it? Well, just do your best. Ta. It’s YXA 998. Old Sunbeam. Got that? Good. How long, do you think? And Ken, do you want to meet for a drink – you can give it to me then? You got it in one. All right. No, you’re right. Yes. Cheerio.’ He hung up. ‘He has to get the files from storage – if they still exist.’

  ‘You’re meeting for a drink?’ I said, amazed. ‘It’s urgent.’

  ‘You never know who’s listening, even to police lines,’ he explained calmly. ‘Especially to police lines. You don’t want to raise any suspicion, so you keep things social.’ I regretted my naivety. ‘He’s in Somerset House. I’m meeting him at two, at a pub round the corner from there.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s safe to go anywhere near the Strand?’ I asked. ‘Today of all days.’

  He shrugged. ‘No worse than anywhere else today.’

  15

  The First Secretary is now making his way to Highgate Cemetery to visit the tomb of Karl Marx. It was Comrade Blunt’s leadership of the Communist Party of the Republic of Great Britain that resulted in the fulfilment of the promise that Marx and Engels made: that Communism would flourish in the land of Britain.

  News broadcast, RGB Station 1, Liberation Day,

  Tuesday, 18 November 1952

  The stream of tanks and armoured cars, ranks of men with Kalashnikovs, girls with shining pistols and fresh-faced Pioneers holding up photographs of Comrade Blunt stretched for three kilometres along the swept-and-washed Strand, up Fleet Street, where the crowds were held behind steel barriers, and around the People’s Hall of Solidarity like a noose. Tibbot was meeting Kenneth alone in a pub around the corner, because it could have made Kenneth nervous if I had turned up too; and watching the parade was the best way for me to avoid attention while I waited nearby.

  A squadron of Air Pioneers marched past with little wings stitched to the lapels of their uniform. They were the boys who had shown the most aptitude in their dexterity tests and now dreamed of piloting Soviet-made Yaks in dogfights with the Americans above London. They wore proud expressions as they passed their yelling parents and jealous schoolfriends. After the boys came the older girls in the boiler suits of engineers, followed by honoured assembly-line workers. And then a crowd-pleasing moment as a cavalry regiment trotted through, the kids behind the barriers scrambling forward to get a closer look at the stamping horses.

  Liberation Square was unnaturally warm and humid due to the surrounding jets of paraffin flame that constituted the Smog Dispersal System: the intense heat from the circle of bright fires evaporated the suspended droplets of water in the smog, thinning it until there was just a light smoky mist. It had saved the lives of countless air crews during the War who would otherwise have been unable to find the landing strips, and now it enabled us to see our leaders in all their glory. Along with boiling the air, its light threw a strange dark glow on us, accentuating the lines and shadows in everyone’s flesh.

  And, finally, there he was: borne on a wave of cheers, Anthony Blunt, standing upright in a huge, open-topped car sweeping along the road. Officially, Blunt’s role in the day’s ceremonies was to pay respect to his forebears, not to receive it for himself. So he had first visited the desk in the National Museum Reading Room at which Marx had sat while he composed Das Kapital, and then the great man’s grand mausoleum at Highgate Cemetery. Now Blunt was serenely climbing to the platform as the crowd shouted his name. At precisely one thirteen, the time that the Archangel’s guns had fired for the first time on a German cruiser, a squadron of Red Guards shot three times into the air, and Comrade Anthony Blunt stepped to the microphone.

  He stood for a moment surveying the crowd as we waited upon his words. A breeze slipped among us. Then he leaned in and spoke, his aristocratic voice dripping with confidence. ‘The destiny of man is a river. It has shallows and rapids. Eddies and calms. There are times when it is so dark that it cannot be made out, and others when it is so bright that a child knows where it is heading. We know where we are heading.’ He waited as people whispered to their neighbours. His address was different from those he broadcast on the radio: there was less delicacy and nuance; these were words for a huge audience. ‘We know because for the first time in the tide of human life, we, the people, can steer our course.’ More whispering, excitement. The wind blew the heat from the paraffin jets over us.

  He grew more forceful. ‘For the first time in history, no one who falls sick will die from want of care; no one will sit idle for want of work; no one will lie hungry for want of bread. For the first time in history, all men and all women can choose their rulers; can walk where they want, can say what they believe.’ I couldn’t help but wish that were true, and somehow, as he said it with confidence and commitment, I almost believed that it were. Atmosphere can do so much to what you feel and think. ‘We know what we believe.’

  He pulled back from the microphone and, like a ballet, behind him the other Secretaries filed on from the sides. Kim Philby and Arthur Wynn took their seats at the side of the dais. They looked self-assured. Today was the day they jostled for public recognition, building popularity among the people, while their backroom deals for influence stayed hidden. Yet someone was missing: the Secretary for Information, Guy Burgess, never appeared. And he was said to be the most ambitious of all.

  ‘Have they purged Burgess already?’ I heard someone snigger. ‘Gone like Cairncross?’

  ‘Shut up,’ a woman muttered angrily.

  The man must have been drunk. Nobody dared mention John Cairncross in public these days. Not since he had been caught sabotaging our industrial effort in order to aid the Americans. His trial had been broadcast on the radio, and he had famously broken down in tears when the verdict was announced, mumbling an apology to the nation that he had betrayed for money. At the end, it was said that he had looked up towards the public gallery, as if hoping to spot someone there, but the only spectators were feverishly clapping the judgement.

  Blunt’s speech boomed for half an hour through the damp air. He spoke of our place in the world and our commitment to the peoples of other nations before returning, at the end, to ourselves. ‘We are pioneers,’ he said, his voice alive with self-belief. ‘Ahead of us is a new land of equality and justice and plenty for all, where the people who create the wealth have equal shares in that wealth, instead of being forced to stand by and see it leached away by birth right and privilege.’ The crowd bristled with energy at his words. ‘Yes, we are pioneers of a new land, yes, we are pioneers of a new, better humanity!’ And they burst out in cheers, men and women crying for their golden future. The Red Guards fired into the air. And again. And again.

  And yet, when Blunt retired to a wall of applause led by Comrade Philby, who thanked the First Secretary for his inspirational words, he had been on his feet for far less time than in previous years. That sign, we all knew, would be pored over in the privacy of people’s homes that evening – not to mention at the DUK’s London headquarters in St James’s Palace.

  Among all the joy I was itching to leave, and as soon as I felt I could do so without turning up too early and worrying Kenneth, I pushed my way through the crowd and down a street leading in the direction of the Thames. The road turned out to hold a picture house that, like all the cinemas that day, was showing Lorelei’s crowning glory, Victory 1945. It was one of a triple bill with Charlie Chaplin’s old anti-capitalist satire Modern Times and the new one he had produced since moving back to the Republic from Hollywood, The Old Soldier, in which a thinly disguised Churchill rants all day at his peaceful and bemused neighbours and ends up shovelling himself into a hole that he can’t get out of.

  There was something queer about the street, though. It was filled not with the normal mix of damp people and dirty vehicles, but with a hundred former army motorbikes, all painted black. Their riders sported old-fashioned clothes and greased-up hair: Teddy Boys, many with gir
ls perched behind them on the machines. They swarmed like bees around the entrance to the cinema and there was a constant buzz of engines as more arrived or departed.

  I should have expected to see Lorelei’s image that day, of course, but still it was a shock suddenly to come across it on the film’s poster outside the cinema. I had seen it in her house after her death but out in public like this it seemed almost to bring her back to life.

  I hadn’t watched the film since meeting Nick, because seeing her light up the screen would only have made me more envious of all that she had, and left me wondering again what Nick could possibly see in me. But, as I stared at the poster, her character rousing her resistance cell to rise up against the Nazis, something fell into place like a tumbler in a lock. Tibbot had said there would be a key to decipher the book code. Well, there it was, I was sure, right in front of me. Lorelei’s face was whispering it: whispering the name of the film. Victory 1945. Victory Nineteen Forty-Five.

  ‘I think you’re lost,’ a voice close to me said. It was an oily-haired boy, little older than the ones I had tried, with mixed success, to interest in Romeo and Juliet. ‘This is our street. Not yours.’

  ‘Not now,’ I said. I couldn’t tear my eyes from Lorelei’s.

  He seemed taken aback. ‘Yes, now.’

  ‘Come on, Alfie,’ called one of the girls. ‘Just tell her to piss off.’

  I looked at her. ‘I used to teach little girls like you,’ I said. ‘I used to rap them across the knuckles with a ruler.’

  Her friends hooted with laughter at my words and the boy broke into a grin. ‘I like you,’ he said, making a low, sweeping bow. ‘Yeah, I think I like you. All right, where you going?’ I pointed to the picture-house entrance. It was surrounded by the other Teddies like a guard. He started leading me towards it. ‘Right, you sods, out the way. Lady coming through.’ He pulled a few out of my path and I made it to the doorway to stare at the poster and Lorelei’s image, working things out. From inside the cinema, there was a chaos of shouting – it looked like the management were trying, and failing, to maintain order while the Teddies were milling around, throwing drinks and food from the kiosk, juggling with bottles of milk. A man in a suit kept shouting that he had called the police. I could hear the film playing; it must have been the scene in which the Archangel arrives – there were gunshots and explosions, cheers from the auditorium. ‘This is our Liberation Day,’ chuckled Alfie.